A bit of history: the changing profile of this blog

Dear readers and followers you may have noticed that in the last years, activity on this blog has become less, while the content of what has been posted has become more focused. In this text we just want to spell out this change and make this orientation clearer, for future posts as well. When we …

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Autonomy and Self-Sufficiency in South Greenland – a multimodal ethnographic storymap

With all the difficult geopolitical news related to Greenland, the obvious anthropological gaze on autonomy is from the ground, based on people's lived experience on land and sea. Together with Angaartaaq Janussen and Philip Burgess, we have tried to document such a unique story using multiple modes including text, sound, video and imagery, which you …

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The benefits of the cold: open-access book 2025

Finally the time has come for a separate blog post advertising and celebrating the publication of a book volume, for which more a dozen Arctic scholars have been waiting for six years: several of us were wrapping up a workshop at Tohoku University's Center for Northeast Asian Studies (Japan), in 2019, where we discussed if …

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New Book in Sámi Studies Illuminates the Diversity of Sámi Worlds

A major contribution to Sámi Studies, The Sámi World presents a diversity of research topics from across Sápmi, providing rich and multifaceted understandings of Sámi worlds. The book has been edited by Sanna Valkonen, Professor of Sámi Research, and researchers Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva and Sigga-Marja Magga from the University of Lapland. Written in English, …

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Reindeer nomadism as profession, lifestyle, passion and love: Sergei Serotetto

русский текст ниже One of the world's most respected reindeer nomads, 1954-2021, mourning for a friend (all photos in this post © by Florian Stammler) Один из самых уважаемых оленводов , друг ушёл из жизни The news from the tundra was a shock: last year we celebrated Sergei Serotetto's 66th birthday together in his chum …

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The Arctic Environmental Responsibility Index – oil and gas better than mining?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bse.2698 This has been a long journey and a lot of work several years: jointly with a number of interdisciplinary colleagues, we published our article on the ranking of Arctic extractive industries in terms of environmental responsibility. We might think "how is this related to Arctic Anthropology?", but it actually is a lot, both because …

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The Experience of Displacement and Social Engineering in Kola Saami Oral Histories

Public defence of the doctoral dissertation by blog contributor Lukas Allemann on 15 Oct 2020 Our team member and periodic blog contributor Lukas Allemann examines in his thesis people’s experiences of Soviet-time, state-initiated displacement and (re)emplacement on the Kola Peninsula as well as the consequences of these developments. Sources show that Saami communities bore the …

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